Tag Archives: Booth Museum of Natural History

The images stopped me in my tracks. These are the haunting signs that will make any entomologist hang their head in melancholy regret at things lost and gone forever.

Echoes of the butterflies what were once stored in this box.

… and the swallowtails that were once here.

These shadowy outlines were stained into the paper lining a couple of store-boxes I recently picked up at the Booth Museum of Natural History, in Brighton. They are all that is left of the butterfly specimens earnestly collected, carefully mounted and proudly pinned into the cork by some long-gone entomologist.

Imagine what would happen to the dried insect specimens, pinned into the box (the boxes stored flat to allow some stacking), if the butterfly bodies and wings suddenly and magically turned to fine dust. The dust would fall and settle on the white paper beneath, in exactly the same shape as the insect that was once above, and over the months or years the undisturbed dust would impregnate the white fibres of the lining, casting a tinge of discoloration. All that remains are the naked pins and the small rectangles of the data labels. Now the pins and labels have been removed, leaving their own echoes too.

There is no magic involved, though, just the depredations of the larvae of museum beetles — Anthrenus species. ‘Undisturbed’ is the operative word here. Undisturbed, unmonitored, unseen inside the boxes, a population of museum beetles chewed through the butterflies until there was nothing left but the beetles’ powdery dusty droppings.

Every museum in the world will have horror stories of some precious and irreplaceable collection reduced to dust like this. Store-boxes are especially prone, because they are apt to be left shut up for years or decades at a time. Glass-topped cabinet drawers, at least, can be easily pulled out and examined for the tell-tale dusty signs of an infestation — hopefully caught early on.

Like many museums, the Booth is glad to get rid of all the store boxes it can, transferring the many specimens into standard glazed drawers. And as I’m discussing this with the curators they shake their heads and bemoan the state of so many collections that come their way. This is all very significant for me, because I have just helped them transfer the nine cabinets of my father’s insect collections into the museum, along with a cabinet of snail shells and his herbarium, all of which he bequeathed to the Booth in his will. During his lifetime he was lucky that he never had any Anthrenus infestations.

The museum can heave a sigh of relief that the Alfred W. Jones bequest is pest-free, and there are no signs of any ghostly shadows on the paper linings of the drawers.

The Bugman

CURIOUS? WHY CURIOUS?

When 17th century apothecary and naturalist James Petiver published a picture of what, for 200 years, would be Britain's most enigmatic butterfly, Albin's Hampstead Eye, he reported: "Where it was caught by this curious person". His implication was that Eleazar Albin was not just strange, not just odd, but was fuelled by curiosity.

Ongoing projects:

These are some of the books and other projects going on at the moment......

WASP

Dylan Thomas wondered deeply about the worth of wasps. Although we are not told which authors wrote them, among the 'useful' presents he recieved were 'books that told me everything about the wasp, except why. This is the why.

Beetles — in the Collins New Naturalist series

I like beetles, I like them very much indeed, so I wrote a book about them.

Call of nature: the secret life of dung

A key selling point is the fact that the spine of the book is adorned with an elephant's bottom. Publication: February 2017.

House guests, house pests

A natural history of animals in the home. Click here for details of how to get the now scarce hardback.

The paperbacks were released into the wild in February 2016

How to be a curious entomologist

A series of introductory 'how to' workshops/ seminars. Click here for follow-up information.

Mosquito

Published August 2012. How an irritating but trivial gnat became imbued with dark menace well beyond its diminutive size.